The first time Nicole Kidman saw The Shining she was 14 and more interested in her 16-year-old boyfriend. Later, she watched it again, although by this time she was an actor. She and her former husband, Tom Cruise, rented a huge, empty chateau in France and hired this 1980 film, which also takes place in a big, remote, nearly empty building. Late at night, they slipped it into the video recorder. "We purposely watched it that way - to magnify the experience," Kidman says. "It was terrifying."

Since then, Kidman not only got to know the movie's director, Stanley Kubrick, but also worked for him in his final film, Eyes Wide Shut. In a screening room in Santa Monica, Kidman recently prepared to watch The Shining for the first time since she had worked with Kubrick, who died in 1999. "It isn't necessarily my favourite Kubrick film," she says, "but I do love it. What interests me now, and why I want to see it again, is what Stanley was able to do with horror as a movie genre. Great directors are often able to go into a genre and elevate it."

The Shining, based on a Stephen King novel, begins, and the opening credits get under way. A long, slow, gliding shot overlooks a car as it makes its way along a deserted mountain road, higher and higher up the pine-flecked ridges, while low, ominous music plays. We get our first view of the Outlook, a huge hotel high in the mountains with a gigantic hedge maze.

"It's become such an iconic image," Kidman says. "This big, creepy hotel high in the mountains. How often since this have you seen something in a film or television show and thought, 'Oh, it's just like The Shining?'"

In the opening scenes, we meet Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance, a former schoolteacher applying for a job as the hotel's winter custodian. Torrance and his family - his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and their son Danny (Danny Lloyd) - will be snowed in all winter. Not a problem, Torrance tells the hotel's manager (Barry Nelson). He is beginning a new career as a writer and needs peace and quiet to begin work.

Two things immediately become apparent: as in many Kubrick films, the speech is strangely flat, not to the point of unnaturalness but just enough to give an odd feel. And the director clearly fussed about the framing of his shots. Everything appears posed and arranged. "Stanley is the master of that," Kidman says. "He was very precise about his framing, mostly because of the way he wanted to use the Steadicam in the movie."

The Steadicam is a portable camera that can be moved about freely without any shaking. It was a new toy back in the late 1970s, when Kubrick was making The Shining. He was among the first to use it. And he showed how it could become not merely another tool, but also a gateway into a new visual style.

In The Shining, Kubrick made these ostentatiously smooth camera movements - relatively new to audiences - into a motif for the film. The steadiness of the camera movements mixed with the grisly subject matter into a mood of unease, especially when juxtaposed with the odd, often emotionless speech. "Stanley would tell us he was not interested in naturalness," Kidman recalls. "He was not interested in a sort of documentary style performance. He liked it to be slightly odd, slightly off."

As Torrance talks to the hotel manager and his staff, the tinge of artificiality in the speech makes it seem as if everybody is trying a little too hard to seem natural. Even in the next scenes between Wendy and Danny, back home and talking about their move up to the Outlook, the clear affection between them is subtly tinged with the same sense of stilted portentousness.

So when the horror creeps into the story, it seems to flow directly out of the strange atmosphere these techniques have created. First we learn that the previous caretaker had apparently suffered a mental breakdown during the long winter and murdered his entire family. Then we discover that Danny is a lonely boy who talks to what his mother believes is an imaginary friend, Tony. Danny takes on a high-pitched, raspy tone when he speaks in Tony's voice, and he curls one of his index fingers up and down in time to Tony's lines.

"I love how all these scenes play out, so easy and confident," Kidman says. "And that thing the boy does with his finger, do you see that? Stanley said the boy came up with that during a casting session, so they wrote it into the script. It was so right and so creepy."

Kidman sees a connection between Brecht and Kubrick. "Brecht thought that by creating naturalism you were asking the audience to become emotionally attached to the characters. What Brecht felt, and what directors like Stanley or Lars von Trier are saying, is that it's not about becoming attached to the characters or imagining that it's really happening to you. That's what Stanley liked about a performance. It didn't have to be real - it just had to be slightly heightened."

The peculiar speech even begins to feel almost comical, in a dark way, as the subject matter becomes more grisly. Long, expository passages as the hotel's previous murders are described to Torrance in a matter-of-fact way take on a funny tinge.

"You really get that slight black-comedic thing, don't you?" Kidman says. "That is definitely no accident. From getting to know Stanley, I know this is very much his sense of humour. Once you begin to hear the comedy in it, you pick up on more and more of it as the movie goes along."

The first signs of strain in the Torrance family are felt as they drive back up to the Outlook. The forced cheerfulness of Nicholson's earlier scenes with the hotel manager are a sharp contrast to the sense of anger and tension as he drives and listens to his wife and son prattle on.

"The happy family," Kidman laughs. "See how irritated Jack looks. You can tell he feels trapped in that car. Let's face it, Shelley's character can be irritating. Look how mean Jack is. He doesn't hold back. Such a good combination, Stanley and Jack. Who would have guessed it?"

By this time, the audience has been let in to a secret about Danny: Tony is more than an imaginary friend. He is a real, spiritual presence ("a little boy who lives in my mouth") who gives Danny visions of carnage.

In her recent horror movie The Others, Kidman starred with child actors, and she finds herself amazed by the perfor mance Kubrick draws from Danny Lloyd. "God, he is so good," Kidman says. "His scenes are often long and really depend on his performance. It's so difficult to get a child to do that."

She is particularly taken with a scene between Danny and the chef Scatman Crothers as the hotel closes for the winter. Crothers, a psychic, communicates telepathically with the boy. Danny sits transfixed. "I love how he doesn't blink," Kidman says. Danny is told he has a gift known as shining, although he is right not to tell his parents everything about it or Tony. "Kubrick just lets the scene play. He always did that. On Eyes Wide Shut, he'd let things play and play, even when there was nothing but silence. I'd think, 'Ooh, no way this is getting into the movie - it's going on way too long.' And then Stanley would use that exact take."

It adds to the creepiness, she says. Audiences are accustomed to scenes of a certain length; often they are awaiting the cut. So when it does not come, it is felt subliminally and focuses viewers' attention, makes them feel a little adrift, even tense.

As Torrance begins to deteriorate mentally - having some frightening visions of his own, all leading him to the notion of killing his family - the sprawling hotel, buried under huge snowdrifts, begins to feel more and more claustrophobic. And Wendy, first in denial and then in panic, realises her husband is not only unhinged but also a threat. "This is where I think Stanley is really able to elevate the horror genre," Kidman says. "He takes his big idea, that of the father figure, the protector figure, becoming a villain, turning into someone you are afraid of. I'm really noticing that this time through."

There is one scene - in the final third of the film, when we know Torrance is fighting the urge to kill his wife and son - in which Danny sits on his father's lap. Nicholson is rubbing the boy's back as he asks subtly threatening questions. The boy is almost slumped over. "Look at this," Kidman says. "Stanley doesn't cut. This is so hard to do with a child. Usually, with this kind of intensity and subtlety, you'd have to edit around. And it's such a long scene. There's only one way this scene could have happened, and that is through the chemistry between director, actor and child."

Nicholson drew barbs at the time for what some critics felt was the over-the-top nature of his performance in the final half-hour, when he degenerates from a taunting madman into a screaming, grunting beast with an axe. But Kidman says: "I think he is very bold. Is some of it over the top? Perhaps. But I don't think the movie would have worked half as well if he'd played it down."

Just as compelling, she says, is the way Duvall's character comes apart - and then pulls herself together - in the final scenes. "Her voice is so high-pitched. When she starts whining and crying, it seems almost comical. You sort of want to laugh, and then you cringe - and then you scream."

No one who has seen it will forget the scene in which Wendy discovers that the book her husband has been labouring over all winter is actually page after page of the same sentence: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." She rips the pages away one after the other while Torrance sneaks up from behind. "It drives you mad, doesn't it? A great shot, a great moment. And yet it's funny, too, in a twisted way. Shelley is just wonderful. Look at her reaction. She's not screaming or anything, just getting more and more frantic. He's coming up behind her, isn't he? Oh, I can't bear it. I really can't bear it."

Kidman lets out a scream when Nicholson's leering face suddenly appears. "It's like the dam bursting on his insanity," she says. "The whole movie has been building up to this."